Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Easy Kid Craft: Autumn Falling Leaves Tree

Before I was a mom, I assumed that my life with children would be a constant craft fest - glue and glitter everywhere, with a healthy collection of paints and markers at the ready for any given idea. Okay, so I have all the supplies. But crafting with toddlers is a little more trying than my pre-kid self anticipated. A lot of my grand ideas are on hold for a couple more years - until everyone decides that eating the supplies is unnecessary. But when I do take the time to create a simplified craft, I'm always amazed at how much fun we have making it! Thus, I bring you the Toddler Approved Easy Autumn Falling Leaves Tree Craft.

This little project requires very few supplies - and that's the best news when you're crafting with littles!

Supplies Needed
-Brown Pipe Cleaners (I used 4 for each tree, but you can use however many you desire)
-Red, Yellow, and Orange mini pom-poms
-Green Crayons
-Half Sheet of Cardstock
-Bottle of Children's Glue

1. Color the "Grass." This could easily be done with paint, Easter grass, or any other green variation you can think of - I was keeping it simple, so I grabbed a couple of green crayons and let Lincoln and Addie color the "ground" of their projects as much (or as little) as desired.

2. Create Your Tree. I used 4 pipe cleaners to make a spider shape, twisting them tightly together in the middle. Once they were connected, I pulled 6 ends to the top for branches and left 2 at the bottom to be the base of the tree.

Next, I cut 2 sets of 2 slits in the paper "ground" and inserted the two tree legs, twisting them to make them stand (see below).

The trees were a little wobbly, so I ended up using some Scotch tape to secure them (I covered the slits and pipe cleaners on the underside of the paper with a couple pieces of tape).

Voila! Standing tree!

3. Decorate with Pom-Pom "Leaves." This was definitely the most popular part of our project! I had planned to use the glue to put all of the pom-poms on the tree branches. We did a few, but that ended up being too difficult for the kids to manage alone and they didn't want much help.

We ended up having most of the leaves be "fallen" to the ground, with dots of glue on the paper around the base of the tree. Both Lincoln (3) and Addie (almost 2) thought this was the best idea ever. Lincoln wanted to put the spots of glue down himself, and they used almost the entire stash of red, orange, and yellow pom-poms to decorate their trees.

Our little trees are happily on display and we'll use them in preschool to talk about the changing seasons and all of the different colors of leaves that we see outside!